Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in France for most of his adult life. He wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.
Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which鈥攊n new forms for the novel and drama鈥攊n the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". In 1984 he was elected Saoi of Aosd谩na.
Stories and Texts for Nothing is a collection of stories by Samuel Beckett.
It gathers three of Beckett's short stories ("The Expelled," "The Calmative," and "The End", all written in 1946) and the thirteen short prose pieces he named "Texts for Nothing" (1950鈥�1952). All of these works are collected in the Grove Press edition of Beckett's complete short prose.
Is there any hope for the hopeless misfits, the castoffs, and the downright pariahs of our modern inner cities?
Maybe not, Samuel Beckett seems to say, and certainly NOT on our own high-falutin terms!
But do we then just pray that God will sort them all out?
No. And I know of many a good Franciscan brother, or manager of a downtown homeless shelter, or even one of the kids who helps out full-time at a l鈥橝rche community, who will tell us we can at least try to UNDERSTAND them.
THAT we CAN at the very least try to do!
And who says our shibboleths are more real than theirs, ANYWAY?
Once, in the late 1970鈥檚, I approached a panhandler in the market centre of centre town. He was in his sixties or seventies, ragged and unshaven, and he asked me for a bit of spare change.
No! I said to myself.
Buy him a good lunch - you haven鈥檛 eaten yet, I told myself, and your break is a full hour.... Go ahead and DO it!
So I marched him into a Kresge鈥檚 Five and Dime - back then you could order a hot chicken sandwich for under five bucks.
Well, I should have told the girl to hold the pie on his order... a bit too rich, in his state of half-stupor.
He lost it in a back alley on the way back to his begging spot.
But, man, was he grateful.
He even shook my hand... which I promptly lathered and washed with hot water the moment I got back to the office! But when we were at Kresge鈥檚 I honestly didn鈥檛 CARE who saw me there with him.
To me at that moment he was a struggling kindred spirit.
We CAN sit down with these people, our dark alter egos, even if only to share a good cup of coffee and a few hearty (though maybe a bit condescending?) laughs over our picayune differences, and appreciate them for what they鈥檙e trying to accomplish in their lives - the wholesale salvation of their souls.
Or, Beckett seems to say, 鈥榶ou can come with me and vicariously enter into their gentle souls on one of their crosstown aimless midnight rambles.
鈥業鈥檒l even let them tell you their stories - as their wearied, bedraggled souls tell them to me in their eyes...
鈥榊ou鈥檒l see how amazingly tender-hearted these folks REALLY are.鈥�
And who knows, we may even see that - horrors! - these guys are really quite a lot more HUMAN than we are!
Actually I've only--this time through, so far--read the "Stories" (of this book's title) as I'm in the midst of a project to read Beckett's complete oeuvres in chronological order. That's harder than it seems, given the author's switch from composing in English to French, his rag-tag approach to publishing his works (along with some early reluctance among editors to publish his works), and then his non-chronological translation of his French works into English.
So, what I believe to be true is that "First Love", "The Expelled", "The Calmative", and "The End" were Beckett's first texts written in French, around 1946, after the novel Watt and before the relatively short novel Mercier and Camier. I've also read that Beckett began to write in his third language (I believe Italian to have been his second, given his having studied in Florence and his early devotion to Dante and so many Italian words in the earlier novels and the stories of More Pricks than Kicks) because it was easier, in another language, he says, to write without style. I've also read that part of this conversion of sorts began in his mother's bedroom in Dublin where he had a realization that he was never going to out-Joyce his employer/mentor Joyce so he decided that he would have to forge a new type of text and leave behind the intricate and referential style of the master.
Well, that's all well and good for literary critics (of which I am one only in name, having long given up the game for the writing of actual literature, although it's still my day job). Emerging from the fragments or notes to the composition of a proposed novel called Watt, which is of what the novel Watt consists, the language changes, the game changes, and suddenly Beckett's texts focus, shorten, and move into the first person exclusively. It's an interesting shift only partially explicable by the above-cited historical and self-revealed explanations. Oh, and the texts also get much, much better--in my opinion--and of course usher in the so-called golden period of the author's work wherein adherents of the Iowa writer's workshop would certainly proclaim the Irish nihilist finds his true voice.
In all 4 of the stories mentioned (I know that "First Love" is published in its own collection with later prose and theatre pieces, but really it bears examination along with these other three--heaven knows why the author held it back from publication here as the four stories are pretty much identical in their basic outlines and in the homeless/home-seeking "I" who narrates each) we do find the simpler sentences and aplomb of a foreign speaker in a language not his own. Although I could facetiously argue that such lack of stylistic flourish is really only another style, that of simplicity and aplomb. However, there is garish style--really only an obvious embellishment of language--and the lack of embellishment that we associate with non-style. There is a certain non-style here that goes well with the non-plot and the non-moral and the barely existent, tenuous narrative "I" who has no discerning features of his own besides bodily illness and decomposition--which, arguably, is only one more of the things fostered upon him from outside. I mean, these narrators claim to have no desires, no aims, and barely manage to put up with what happens to them, almost completely by chance. They in no way participate in the foibles of the willing world and that world, for the most part, shuns them. Their company are rats, their lives are spent in basements, their voices heard only here in their texts as they have mostly lost the power of speech.
For me these stories have two greatly valuable qualities: Being about nothing in particular, they changed the possibilities of Modernist literature in a way that no other author had then managed to do--and very few authors today can come close to this level of rejection of character, plot, and moral and still manage to get published--despite Beckett's popularity. Secondly, even though I have to ask myself why this middle class Irishman enjoying a middle class French existence would choose to create characters who are, by bourgeois standards, bums, the mere fact of creating characters in the Western World who are neither citizens nor workers, and who do not participate in any way in either the capitalist system or the modern nation state is utterly remarkable. More than that, it's incendiary, revolutionary. These voices never even consider the myriad day-to-day assumptions of capitalist citizen-slaves. They simply do not play.
Since this is an election year, I kept thinking of the joy I would have forcing the various candidates to read these tales so that I could watch their confusion and discomfiture. Only Bernie Sanders could handle them without freaking out, I imagine. But he would try to start some social program to save them--and that, while a wonderful expression of human empathy, is also clearly not the point of these revolutionary texts. They tell us what is wrong with our world through anti-example. We would destroy all those who do not play despite the fact that the game is barely a hundred years old and is so very clearly rigged against us all. For these voices there is only the calmative of a story, a tale ill seen and ill said.
* * *
OK, so now I've also read "Texts for Nothing," in their proper chronological order with Beckett's oeuvres, after The Unnamable. I've not too much to say about them. It's clear that they were written at the same time, or alternately, in the same years, anyway, as The Unnamable since they deal with similar literary problems that Beckett's work was confronting more and more in the progression of this second, French, phase of his writing--who is this speaking voice and why/how does/can the voice speak. There are even several re-occurring phrases within both texts so perhaps they could have been combined even into a single volume somehow. But more than complimentary I found them a bit at odds in terms of style, even if the subject matter was so similar.
There's no easy (or even eventually definitive) answer to these literary questions the two texts ask, they merely become the motor for much musing upon--and apparent suffering over--topics dealing with voice, character, narration, and the anguish inherent in uttering anything into the posterity of the written page. While the "Texts" cover pretty much the same ground as The Unnamable, they're far more disciplined, organized, concise, and artistic than the novel. That is not at all to say they are better. Actually I found them a bit trite after the undisciplined take-no-prisoners attitude of the novel. I would recommend that you read them before you read The Unnamable.
N膿, nu j膩, es nezinu, varb奴t ar墨 n膿, bet to jau nav iesp膿jams zin膩t, nekad nav bijis iesp膿jams zin膩t, jo neko nav iesp膿jams zin膩t, atliek tikai las墨t un cer膿t, ka varb奴t pien膩ks diena, kad var膿s saprast to, kas ir bijis uzrakst墨ts, ja tas ir bijis uzrakst墨ts, ja tas ir izzin膩ms, tad varb奴t ar墨 var膿s pateikt j膩 vai n膿, vienu vai otru, jo tam galu gal膩 ir j膩b奴t vienam vai otram, vai varb奴t ar墨 n膿, es nezinu.